Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  I sighed a long and ragged breath, as Air Force One started to taxi. “This will be interesting to deal with,” I said, feeling utterly drained. “I suppose there’s not much else you can do. Suggest to the governor that he stop engaging with these idiots and let them flee—”

  “He’s tried that, sir,” Phillips said. “The police attempted to pull out twenty minutes ago.” I heard shuffling behind him, muffled voices as someone delivered Phillips an update. “They’ve realized that no one can stop them, so …”

  “So why stop?” I leaned my head back against the padded chair.

  There was a noise in the background behind Phillips. “Stand by, sir,” he said, and the bastard put me on hold. A Muzak version of Andy Williams’s “Moon River” drifted through the earpiece at me, and the beauty of the song momentarily quashed my annoyance at being placed on hold. Not for long, though, because this was not the sort of thing you did to the president of the United States.

  I hung up and grasped for my TV remote. I clicked it on, and the flatscreen mounted into the wall flared to life, immediately resolving into a picture of chaos in the streets of Las Vegas. I’d never been that fond of the town myself, but I had no particular desire to see it leveled to the ground. Especially not when I could conceivably take any kind of blame for it.

  The chyron at the bottom of the screen declared chaos in a slow sprawl, but there was something else, words emblazoned that gave me chills:

  “SIENNA NEALON ARRIVES AT VEGAS METAHUMAN INCIDENT; MOTIVES UNKNOWN.”

  “You all really are a bunch of idiots if you don’t know her motives,” I said, sagging back in my seat. Another sigh, long and irritated, escaped. I knew, beyond doubt, that this Vegas incident was about to be settled more surely than if Phillips’s team had been deploying right now.

  But I would rather have seen the whole damned city burn than let Sienna Nealon get credit for saving the day.

  8.

  Sienna

  I had to be very careful escaping Cedar City in the middle of the day. I’d flown low and quick over fences and flat desert until the city was out of sight, then I’d streaked skyward and hit top speed somewhere over endless scrub and sands. I headed southwest, hewing close to the freeway, until I’d see it popping up on the horizon, an oasis in the middle of the desert.

  Las Vegas.

  Black smoke was billowing out of the strip, clouds stretching skyward like someone had installed a coal-burning plant in the middle of the casino mecca. I had my hoodie on, had in fact stapled the damned thing to my forehead along with a dark-haired wig to hide my new hairdo, and I’d left my glasses behind in the desert, like I was Kara Danvers or something. I wasn’t wearing a unitard, though, or high red boots and a cape. It was just me and my hoodie, and some baggy jeans as usual, with steel-toed boots for the ball-kicking power they provided.

  Vacation was over. Now I had my suit on and it was time to get back to work.

  I flew in hot, near the speed of sound, not entirely sure what I was dealing with. The news had offered me an alert of the sort I used to live by. I knew there were metas down there, I knew they were causing havoc and ripping stuff up. I liked Vegas, and had always meant to come back here for a vacation. These clowns tearing up the Strip were probably the least of the reasons I wouldn’t be back anytime soon, but they were the ones I could most easily deal with.

  I didn’t know exactly what I was waltzing into as I flew past the massive Ferris wheel that aped the London Eye, but I knew fire was at least part of it, because one of the Aria towers—the taller one—was burning, blazing orange flames shooting out the windows. A siren howled in front of me and I saw a Las Vegas Fire Department engine heading toward the chaos as an explosion sounded over the strip. Two cop cars were screaming along behind them, and all I could see ahead was black clouds, fire blossoming up in the middle of the street. Faint blue flashes that looked like they might have been lights from a cop car lit the clouds of black.

  In spite of the chaos and the screaming pedestrians running down the sidewalks and across Las Vegas Boulevard, the first responders, the police, the ambulances were still heading into the chaos rather than away from it.

  I did the same.

  I slowed as I flew blind through the billows of black smoke. A cop car in flames added to the sooty mess, and I drew out the fire and snuffed it as I came in. I darted down a side street, figuring first things first—I needed to put out the Aria tower, because it was unlikely the fire department was going to be able to do much about it given how bad things were looking on the boulevard.

  I came up the side of the tower and landed on the roof. I could kindasorta feel the flames within, Aleksandr Gavrikov close to the front of my mind, his powers at my fingertips. The back of the tower wasn’t burning yet, which meant someone had started the fire out front, as though they’d pitched it in through the front windows.

  That I could deal with.

  I took a running start and jumped off the roof, letting gravity carry me down the front of the tower. I stopped in place about fifty feet down and started to draw the flames to me. Screams carried on the wind, and I cringed as another explosion went off below. I pulled the fire out of the front segment of the tower, absorbing it into my hands, my mouth, the skin on my face. It was hot, like swallowing a flaming torch, but I did it, the smoky residue tasting like someone was having a barbecue on the tip of my tongue.

  I drifted slowly downward, pulling the fire to me as I went. It probably looked funny, if I was even visible to anyone through the cloud of smoke. I hoped I wasn’t, because I wanted the element of surprise on my side when I went to deal with these assclowns who were destroying the city. I prioritized saving lives because as long as they didn’t light another hotel on fire, keeping the Aria tower from collapsing was almost certainly my best bet for immediate impact.

  Besides, I was still chewing over a pretty big decision, and it tormented me, bouncing around in my head, all the way down as I drifted my way to the ground. I usually make my decisions swiftly, but in this instance …

  In this instance, I was pretty torn.

  I drifted out of the bottom of the cloud, every single bit of fire pulled into my skin, which felt flushed and hot. I’d broken into a sweat, and not just because of the hoodie, the wig, and the desert heat. All that fire didn’t just dissipate inside me, after all. It took time, like I was ingesting a big meal, and by the time my feet touched ground, I was tired and wanted to go home to sleep it off. Preferably after a shower to get the smoky smell off me. It no longer resembled the scent of barbecue, because all the insulation and drywall and plastic and bedding had all lit off in the blaze, which meant I was coated in about a million and a half chemicals, none of them exactly Febreeze fresh.

  Someone cackled maniacally about a hundred yards ahead of me, and I peered down the hazy street. I caught a glimpse of motion, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d seen at first. It took a minute for my brain to chug along, to decipher exactly what I was looking at.

  It was a man in armor.

  It wasn’t cool armor, either, like the newer iterations of Iron Man. No, it was Tony-Stark-in-the-cave-with-hammer-and-anvil type stuff, rough plates of metal bound tightly around a big frame. I couldn’t see the guy hidden beneath, but I’d certainly seen this MO before. I’d fought a man named David Henderschott early in my career who’d used his metahuman ability to bind to any surface to armor up with giant plates of metal and cause various and sundry problems. Some of my early exploits had surfaced since the manhunt had begun, and I had to guess that whoever this guy was, he’d taken some notes from Henderschott, probably figuring that wearing armor was a smarter, more efficient use of his skin-anchoring powers than trying to play like Spider-Man without the webbing.

  And so far, it looked like he’d been right. He stomped up to a police cruiser that was already on fire and smashed a metal fist into it, sending it skidding back down the street. A crashing noise informed me it had found some target, probably not a goo
d one, and an explosion followed a moment later.

  “Well, all right, then,” I said, decision made. I’d been contemplating how hard to go after these guys, and this had settled it for me. They were murderers, for certain, and they weren’t just here to hit and run, grab some cash and leave.

  This guy was having fun.

  Only a month ago, he probably wouldn’t have had the brass to try something this big because there’d always been a nuclear deterrent waiting in the wings if a meta got too out of hand. I knew the criminals whispered in the dark, keeping their little schemes quiet, hidden. Most of the idiots I caught were first-time offenders or offenders who’d flown under the radar for a while before I came after them. No one did chaos like this unless they were blindingly stupid or had a death wish, because …

  Because if you did something like this in the United States of America, criminals knew that Sienna Nealon was gonna get your ass. Your ass and the whole rest of you, too, and if you were lucky, she’d just put you in jail after a hard beating.

  But now Sienna Nealon was one of the wanted, so chaos? It was fair game.

  Except it damned sure wasn’t.

  Not in my country. Not anywhere I could easily reach.

  Not ever.

  I launched at the armored ass, fury driving me forward at a speed just below the speed of sound. I angled myself so as not to cause too much collateral damage, but I couldn’t help some. I kicked him, tendons in my foot protesting that I’d just brought steel boot backed by bone and flesh to metal armor, but a quick thought of Wolfe! shut my crying nerves up.

  My steel toe caught metal man right in the ribs and sent him into the air with a perfect punt. He launched headfirst into the side of the Cosmopolitan, the sound of tinkling glass and crunching metal carrying through the smoke to let me know he was going to be busy picking himself up for a few minutes. I didn’t care if he lived or died, though I hoped that the Cosmopolitan was evacuated by now. I suspected it was.

  I set down for a second, limping on my right leg as Wolfe finished stitching the bones and tendons and muscles back together. I peered into the smoke-induced darkness, and heard the unmistakable sound of something heavy and metal thumping to the concrete on the other side of the Cosmopolitan. “And the field goal is good,” I noted, and came around to figure out where the rest of the idiots who’d dared were hiding.

  I caught a bolt of lightning in the face as I whirled, and I thumped to the street on Las Vegas Boulevard, shaking in agony as the black smoke seemed to reach down and envelop me in its darkness.

  9.

  Scott

  Scott’s hand was shaking like the plane as it bucked through the turbulence, fighting against headwinds as it lanced through the sky toward Las Vegas. He didn’t like the feel of it, this rattling sound as the FBI Gulfstream jet fought against the skies around them. His mind was still on the baby in the Cheyenne hospital. He could feel still that plug of liquid he’d created. He’d started to dissolve it now that the wound was sealed, but it was still there, diminishing bit by bit as he carefully let the liquid disperse now that there was stitching to bind the wound together and clotting to fill the spaces between the stitches.

  “Yo, can you do something about this already?” Augustus Coleman asked with thinly masked irritation. The plane jumped again, as though it had crested a wave and then dropped five feet. Augustus’s eyes were firmly anchored on Reed, who was staring straight ahead, lips in a flat, expressionless line.

  “Hm?” Reed came out of it, his trancelike expression dispelled by Augustus’s question. He blinked a few times. “Oh. Yes.” He lifted a hand, and instantly, the ride smoothed.

  “You all right?” Augustus asked over Friday’s low, rumbling snores. The big man was sleeping through it all.

  “Fine,” Reed answered stiffly. Scott watched him, but Reed’s face didn’t register much other than tight focus, that same determination that had been driving him since he’d joined up with the FBI Task Force. “I’d be a lot better if that had been her that ate the bullets this morning.”

  Scott blinked. Something about it was bothering him, something that had been tickling at his mind since he’d helped pull the squirming, bleeding baby out from beneath the woman’s corpse. Reed had pulled that trigger without question, hadn’t he? Pop, pop, pop, and the woman was down. No remorse, no hesitation.

  Since when has Reed ever been like that? The question simmered in his mind. “This is serious business,” Scott said, the words bursting out like a shot from Reed’s gun.

  “Damned straight,” Augustus said with a sharp nod.

  “It requires the most definitive measures,” Scott went on, and his resolve sounded firm, at odds with what was going on in his head.

  “Without doubt,” Reed said. “No mercy.”

  “No hesitation,” Augustus said.

  “No …” Scott’s voice trailed off, and the other two looked at him, both questioningly. “No mercy,” he echoed, the thought he might have voiced faded. He got twin nods of agreement as Augustus and Reed turned back to the front of the cabin.

  Scott stared back and down at the carpet, though, as though he could see through it, through the belly of the plane, and back to Cheyenne, where somewhere behind them a baby lay in a hospital with stitches in his leg and no mother. Scott felt a squirm, and somehow he knew the child was crying, and perhaps wondering where his mother was. Something about that made those questions bubble up even more quickly, like lava from a vent at the bottom of the deepest ocean.

  10.

  Sienna

  Turning your back on an uncleared street in the middle of a fight is not wise, Wolfe growled as he restored me to consciousness with a shock, my eyes snapping open. It didn’t help as much as you might think; Las Vegas Boulevard was an obstacle course of police cars, civilian vehicles, ambulances and fire engines in flames. Smoke threatened to overwhelm me, as though inhaling half the Aria tower hadn’t been bad enough for my health. I pinched my eyes tightly closed again, knowing that someone out there had lightning to toss if I presented myself as a target.

  “… Didn’t think she’d show up,” a low voice said about twenty feet away.

  “No one thought she’d show. Did you get her?” another voice asked. Both male, both tentative, which meant they had more brains than I wanted them to have. I’d prefer they’d been lobotomized destruction machines rather than thinking, aggravating, sucker-punching-me-with-lightning humans.

  “Right in the face,” the first voice crowed. Lightning man. I knew a few of those, but none that sounded like him. He had a little trill of excitement now, thinking he’d dropped Sienna Nealon. “She’s gotta be dead.”

  “Well, so is Charlie, I’m guessing,” the second voice said. I mentally tagged him as Secondi, like the second course in an Italian meal, because I was gonna eat him up, and soon. Charlie must have been the Iron Monkey I sent flying. “Did you see him go?”

  “Yeah … he could make it,” Lightning Man said. “He’s tough, y’know?”

  “He went through a building, dude,” Secondi said. “We should get the money and get out of here. We heisted two casinos and ripped up the Strip, that’s enough for me.”

  “We can’t leave without Charlie,” Lightning Man said. He was barely going to be Antipasti; I had a hand ready, flames prepared to fling at his head. I was through messing around with these turds. “He’ll lead right back to us if they ID his body.”

  “You want to go crawl out there and fetch him?” Secondi asked. “Because it’s outside the smoke, which means they can see—”

  “So go light some fires for cover and get him,” Lightning/Antipasti said. I’d found the brains of the operation, and also figured out that Secondi was a damned Gavrikov. I was about tired of Gavrikovs by now, because they kept popping up. Lightning throwers did too, those Zeus/Thor types, but all the ones I knew that were still alive were on my side, save for Antipasti. I intended to change that.

  I opened my eyes a crack, pleased that t
hey’d lost focus on me in their internal debate. I rolled my palm, aimed it at Lightning’s head, and shot a burst of fire right for his face to repay him for the bolt he’d run through my brain—

  The flame burst arced through the air like gravity had changed its course, and swirled into Secondi’s palm as he dispelled it as easily as I’d taken care of the Aria fires. “Shit! She’s still ali—”

  The street exploded into chaos as I summoned my inner Idina, defied gravity, and shot thirty feet into the air. A bolt of lightning lanced past me and connected with a hanging traffic light, twisting blue coruscations running over its surface as the red, yellow and green lights all lit brightly for a second and then blew out in a shower of sparks. The pole worked as a lightning rod, of sorts, but apparently Antipasti’s strength was pretty intense, because I caught some stray voltage. I felt my heart skip a hundred beats as I staggered in the air like I was flying drunk.

  “Gyaaaaaaah!” I cried as I went sideways into a palm tree’s upper fronds. I wished I still had Kat on my side; she could have used them to yank me out of the way before Antipasti’s next bolt of lightning came squirting at me. I flipped backward behind the tree, and the blast grounded out as the palm tree absorbed the electricity then burst into flames.

  I stuck out a hand, absorbing the fire from the tree and also from a ball of flame that Secondi threw at me. It swerved around the tree, preserving my cover and dispelled harmlessly into my hand. “I don’t suppose you idiots want to make this easy and just surrender now?” I asked, my heart still stammering as Wolfe tried to it get back to normal cardiac rhythm. My head hurt like someone had used it as the titular prop for a particularly talentless episode of The Gong Show.

  “Why would we?” Mr. Lightning J. (for jerkoff) Antipasti called back. “We’re winning!”

  “You’re winning? You’re down a guy already,” I said. “Either give up now or I’m not even gonna make it nice when I beat you, like I would have when I was working for the law. I’m lawless now, so I’m going to strip the flesh from your bones with a finger like a blowtorch after I cut your hands off. When I’m done with you, you’re gonna wish Predator or Hannibal had caught you rather than me.”